Southern Discomfort

The strangest Senate race of the year.

The autumn political contest in Virginia began this year as it always does, with a Labor Day parade and festival in the Shenandoah Valley town of Buena Vista. The event featured appearances by the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, and his predecessor, Mark Warner, another Democrat, who was then considering running for President in 2008. Senator George Allen, a Republican, who was also contemplating a Presidential race, rode the parade route on a jumpy horse called Bubba, and forecast a victory in his current reëlection campaign. Notably missing from the event was Allen’s Democratic opponent, James Webb. To the consternation of some on his team, he had skipped the ritual opening of his first political campaign in favor of a private ritual, three hundred miles away.

At Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, members of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, were preparing for deployment to Iraq. Among them was Webb’s only son, Lance Corporal James R. Webb, known as Jimmy. Two years earlier, Jimmy had interrupted his studies at Penn State and enlisted. His father could hardly protest; Jimmy was taking up the challenge posed by Webb in countless speeches, books, and articles. To Webb, himself once a distinguished member of the Marine Corps, military service was not just a patriotic gesture but part of a test of honor and courage, an essential rite of passage.

Webb had gone to Vietnam in 1969, unburdened by ambivalence at a time when the narrative of the Vietnam War had turned irretrievably toward tragedy. His first novel, “Fields of Fire,” published in 1978, was based on the war—“the finest of the Vietnam novels,” according to Tom Wolfe—and Vietnam continued to be his point of reference, to the degree that even his friends wondered whether it had distorted his perspective. But Webb was shaped not so much by the war as by what he discovered when he returned.

The year 1969 was one of the bloodiest for Americans in Vietnam, with the weekly death toll averaging about two hundred and twenty-five. At home, it was the year of Woodstock, the takeover of the Harvard administration building by student radicals, the trial of the Chicago Eight, and the huge National Moratorium antiwar protest. It was also the year that President Richard Nixon used the term “silent majority” to describe those Americans who did not protest.

When Webb, debilitated by shrapnel wounds received in an action that earned him the Navy Cross, was forced to retire from the military, he enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center, and stepped directly into the culture divide. He hated his time at Georgetown, largely because of his encounter with an attitude that caught him wholly unaware. It seemed to him that many of his classmates had been untouched by Vietnam (except for a gain in self-regard, accrued from opposition to what they deemed an immoral war). Webb concluded that they not only had figured out ways to avoid the risk and sacrifice of military service but had convinced themselves, as they proceeded along their education and career tracks, that theirs was the true heroism of the time. Inspired by his rage, he decided to write “Fields of Fire,” which included a series of withering cameo portrayals of Ivy League graduates who worked the system to avoid service. “Some day he will write speeches for great politicians,” he wrote of one character. “Tim Forbes will confess his boondoggle, and we will admire his honesty. He only did what everybody else was doing.” Webb could recite the minuscule number of men killed in Vietnam who, by his count, had matriculated at the élite colleges (Harvard, twelve; Princeton, six; M.I.T., two) compared with the vast numbers from public schools.

Webb returned to the subject repeatedly in his writing over the next twenty-five years, until he produced what amounted to his own ethnology. He saw himself as a creature of a pervasive but nearly invisible Scots-Irish subculture, descended from the warrior clans of Ulster who migrated to North America in large numbers in the eighteenth century. They came to live mostly in the Appalachian South—a stubborn, bellicose people, fiercely individualistic and egalitarian. They settled the frontiers, invented country music, and fostered a truly native form of American democracy. Most important, they bore the brunt of fighting the nation’s wars. In 2004, Webb published “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.” He had found, he believed, the DNA of red-state America.

In Webb’s world, manhood was a standing, to be earned. When he was a small boy, his father, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, would clench his fist and dare his son to strike it, taunting him to keep punching until the tears flowed. But Webb accepted that a father’s highest duty was to prepare his son for manhood by teaching him to fight, to hunt, and to handle a weapon. He got his first gun when he was eight, and Jimmy did, too. In such a culture, going off to war is part of what Webb calls “the Redneck Bar Mitzvah.”

During the week before Jimmy’s deployment, Webb and his son were joined by José Ramirez, a former marine who is the boyfriend of Jimmy’s sister Sarah, and Dale Wilson, a member of Webb’s platoon in Vietnam, who is a triple amputee. Just before the departure of the transport bus that was taking the marines to the airfield from which they would leave for Kuwait, Jimmy and his father and their friends gathered in the parking lot. Webb had filled a Coke bottle with whiskey, which he poured into four cups. The three older men raised their cups to Jimmy, who offered the final toast: “To those who went before me. And to those who didn’t come back. Now it’s my time.”

That afternoon, Webb, who is sixty, returned to Virginia, where he is running as an antiwar candidate, under the banner of the party of Hillary Clinton and the former protester John Kerry, whose handshake he refused for twenty years.

The unifying theme of Webb’s fiction, his popular history of the Scots-Irish, and, especially, his opinion journalism has been that of put-upon people (the military, Southerners, white men) suffering the smug disregard of a hostile élite. In the Webb reckoning, much blame resides in nineteen-sixties-era liberalism, which has influenced the Democratic Party for a generation. That he now finds himself a Democratic candidate in a pivotal U.S. Senate race is a development that proceeds, by its own stubborn logic, from this insistent theme. Webb’s candidacy is partly a quest to reclaim the Democratic Party for what he sees as a natural constituency.

When Webb deployed to Vietnam as a raw second lieutenant, in 1969, he had no particular political leanings. His mission was to protect the tactical space in front of him, and to bring back as many of his men as possible. Returning home, he felt that he and others like him had been driven from a Democratic Party that had, he believed, sacrificed a broad populist tradition to the passions of the intemperate margins. Webb proved to be a natural polemicist. He denounced “the ones who fled” the war, and inveighed against the acts of the Watergate Congress, which, elected after Richard Nixon’s disgrace, in 1974, halted funding to South Vietnam, hastening its doom. (The plight of the Vietnamese boat people came to have particular meaning for Webb. A girl named Hong Le was among those fished from the water by the U.S. Navy and transported to this country. She became a lawyer, practicing in Washington, and a year ago she became Webb’s third wife. She travels with him on the campaign trail, and is expecting their first child in December.) Webb declared Jimmy Carter’s blanket pardoning of draft resisters a rank betrayal and an abuse of Presidential power. When President Clinton left office, he wrote, “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career.”

Webb reserved a good portion of his pique for the “activist Left and cultural Marxists” and their efforts to effect “what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness.” He saw the Pentagon’s prolonged investigation of the Navy Tailhook sexual-abuse scandal in the nineteen-nineties as a political witch hunt, driven by a radical-feminist agenda to undermine the masculine culture of the military. Affirmative action, he posited, quickly became a means of victimizing white men through “state-sponsored racism.”

In “Born Fighting,” Webb developed the thesis that has become the rationale for his Senate run. Democrats, he argued, had foolishly written off the Southern white male, in the mistaken belief that it was a necessary cost of the Party’s leadership in the civil-rights era. Southern rednecks thus became a convenient symbol of all that impeded progress. “And for the last fifty years,” he wrote, “the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America’s future growth.” In alienating the South, Democrats ceded the region to Republican strategists, who took the trouble to cater to its culture. Webb, who had been a nominal Democrat in his youth, knew this from personal experience. According to Robert Timberg’s book “The Nightingale’s Song,” Webb was recruited into the Reagan Administration by a Republican official who had once heard him being interviewed on the radio. The interviewer, talking to Webb about “Fields of Fire,” mentioned that Jane Fonda was in town and asked Webb whether he might wish to meet her. “Jane Fonda can kiss my ass,” Webb replied. “I wouldn’t go across the street to watch her slit her wrist.” The Republican official, John Herrington, who later became Reagan’s personnel chief, championed Webb’s appointment, in 1984, as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and, in 1987, as Secretary of the Navy.

Webb also believes from experience that the Republican hold on the South is not unshakable. His own political remigration began when he was working on “Born Fighting” and realized that his culture’s natural home is the party of Andrew Jackson. His people don’t hate the government; they hate governmental intrusion. It is the government’s job to build dams and highways, not the perfect society.

“It’s a bottom-up culture that has been manipulated,” he told me one day. “Really, that’s one of the big reasons that I decided to go ahead and do this—test the theory, because I believe it.”

This is, of course, a thought that has occurred to other Democrats. It’s what Howard Dean was trying to get at in 2003, while campaigning for the Presidency, when he said, in a characteristic display of unfortunate phrasing, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” Dean’s point (and Webb’s) is that Democrats cannot succeed in the South until the Party broadens its tent, becoming less insistent on such matters of current Party orthodoxy as abortion, gun control, and gay marriage. “You know, it’s been a hard thing to get through the heads of many Democrats,” Webb says. “They have to rethink a piece of something that’s become fundamental to them, which has hurt them in ways they don’t understand.”

Webb’s campaign adviser David (Mud-cat) Saunders recalls a revealing exchange he had last spring at a retreat for Democratic senators in Philadelphia. “I had a very prominent U.S. senator come up to me and say, ‘Mudcat, why are your people so stupid that they would vote against their own economic self-interest?’ And I replied, ‘Listen, we do vote against our own economic self-interest. We do that. But you say it’s stupid. Do you ever consider that there might be a powerful force at work, and that it’s driving these people to vote against their economic self-interest? I’m telling you, it’s there. It’s called culture.’ ”

Webb, who is licensed to carry a pistol, and whose campaign vehicles include a camouflaged Jeep, will not be mistaken by voters for Howard Dean—or for George Allen. No Southerner could confuse his strenuous opposition to the Iraq war with the reflexive antiwar attitude perceived by many in the South as a partisan wish for American failure. Before the first Gulf war, he testified in a 1990 Senate hearing that taking down Saddam Hussein’s regime would destabilize the region and empower Iran; he maintained that position through the inter-war decade, and points to the current situation as vindication of his view. He believes that the American military is fundamentally unsuited to a long-term occupation. (“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to turn the greatest maneuver force in the world into one going around defending police stations.”) But he does not advocate a sudden coalition pullout, or even a firm timetable for the withdrawal of troops. Rather, he argues for convening a conference of regional players, including Syria and Iran, and getting them invested in finding a resolution for Iraq. At some point, he says, American forces could be repositioned in nearby countries like Jordan and Kuwait, where they would be able to combat terrorism in Iraq with less American exposure.

On domestic matters, Webb’s Democratic populism borrows from the “two Americas” theme that John Edwards struck during his Vice-Presidential campaign, emphasizing the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else. Webb urges strong border security, including the construction of a fence, coupled with strict enforcement of laws that will supposedly stop corporate exploitation of cheap illegal labor. He opposes the free-trade agreements (“Free trade is not fair trade”), and in this and other regards (such as his disdain for neoconservatives: “These guys are so far to the left you think they’re on the right. It’s right out of the Communist International—exporting ideology at the point of a gun”) he almost seems a Pat Buchanan conservative. “I’ve been saying for a couple of years that we’re going through a sea change, where the old labels just don’t apply,” he told me. “What does it mean to be a liberal? What does it mean to be a conservative?” (For Webb, the ambiguity meant that in Virginia’s 1994 Senate race he endorsed the Democrat Chuck Robb over the Republican Oliver North; he then backed George Allen over Robb in 2000; and now he was running against Allen for that same seat.)

Webb’s campaign is working hard to portray him as the kind of Democrat Ronald Reagan could trust. Webb’s first television ad, called “Gipper,” opened with a shot of Reagan giving the 1985 commencement address at the United States Naval Academy. “One man who sat where you do now,” Reagan told the cadets, “is another member of our Administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense James Webb—the most decorated member of his class.” Black-and-white photographs of a young Webb in uniform filled the screen, with Reagan’s voice narrating. “James’ gallantry as a Marine officer in Vietnam won him the Navy Cross and other decorations.” An announcer’s voice then intoned: “Soldier. Scholar. Leader. Now Jim Webb is running for Senate.’’ Nowhere in the ad was the word “Democrat” mentioned.

When Webb’s pollster, Pete Brodnitz, saw the ad, he said, “This is gonna make George Allen’s head explode.” Indeed, the Allen camp put a letter of protest from Nancy Reagan on its Web site and demanded that Webb take the ad off the air. Webb just laughed and said, “If George Allen can find a video of Ronald Reagan praising him, he’s welcome to use it.” The controversy guaranteed free airtime for the commercial in news broadcasts, and had precisely the effect that the Webb camp had hoped for. With the campaign entering its final stretch, the Democrat and the Republican were arguing over who had the greater claim to the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

To George Allen’s critics, there is something manifestly ridiculous about his public personality—his cowboy boots and hat, his “howdy”s and “y’all”s, his lip pack of Copenhagen snuff and his spit cup. Allen, the son of the great football coach George Allen, Sr., grew up in Palos Verdes, California, a prosperous suburb of Los Angeles, and he did not move to Virginia until he was in college, when his father became the coach of the Washington Redskins. “WILL SEN. ALLEN’S COWBOY BOOTS FIT VIRGINIA VOTERS?” was the question asked recently in a Washington Post headline, over a story noting that Virginia “is far from cowboy country.” The Post article, citing Allen “detractors” (Jim Webb’s campaign strategist Steve Jarding), suggested, in an interrogatory tone, what liberal bloggers have long been declaring in the affirmative: George Allen is trying to fool voters into believing that he’s a genuine country boy. A corollary irritant is the prospect that Allen might succeed in posing as his political hero, Ronald Reagan—or, more maddening, that he might even be another Reagan.

As Allen entered the race for a second term in the Senate, his reëlection was considered a foregone conclusion. The bigger question in political circles was his positioning as a contender for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination. Allen, a popular governor of Virginia, who served from 1994 until 1998, had been remarkably successful in passing his conservative agenda—including welfare reform, required achievement standards in the public schools, the right to carry concealed weapons, and the abolition of prison parole—even though the state legislature was controlled by Democrats. He has shown a formidable talent for electoral politics; he was the only Senate candidate to defeat a Democratic incumbent (Robb) in 2000, and, as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he helped engineer a Republican gain in 2004, which included the defeat of the Senate Minority Leader, Tom Daschle. By the conventional calculations of Presidential politics, Allen’s record of conservative orthodoxy automatically made him a favorite in a nominating process that, in both parties, favors orthodoxy. A team of national political consultants, including Mary Matalin, had already signed on.

Such calculations matter, but so does personal chemistry—and that is where the association with Reagan applies. The cowboy-pol image, with its implied bedrock conservatism, is best presented in a sunny package. Reagan (who was born above a bank in Tampico, Illinois, a locale also far from cowboy country) was blessed with a natural amiability, and much of Allen’s success in Virginia can be attributed to his determined good cheer and his slow, easy manner of speaking, the pauses always filled with a smile. It was true that his partisan rhetoric could sometimes get harsh (as when he declared, at a state Republican convention in 1994, “My friends . . . let’s enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats”), but that could be written off as a vestige of an upbringing in a football environment. Astride his horse at the Labor Day parade, Allen was pressed by a reporter about the political wisdom of his cowboy routine during election season. He was wearing a hat, he said, because it was raining. Besides, he added, “kids like horses.” It sounded almost like something Reagan would say.

It is precisely because geniality is an essential component of the George Allen proposition that a casual remark, tossed off at a lazy August campaign stop in a remote corner of Virginia, threatened to become his undoing.

Allen was addressing an outdoor gathering at the Breaks Interstate Park, near the Kentucky border. This is Allen country, staunchly conservative, and he was imploring his supporters to “motivate” for the stretch run when he was distracted by a ubiquitous presence. It was S. R. Sidarth, a twenty-year-old University of Virginia student, and a summer volunteer for the Webb campaign, who worked as a Webb “tracker”—following Allen along the campaign trail with a digital camcorder, hoping to capture some word or deed that might embarrass the Senator. (Allen has a tracker on Webb, too.) Chatting casually, his sleeves rolled up, Allen gestured toward Sidarth and introduced him to the crowd. “This fellow here, over here, with the yellow shirt,” Allen said, “Macaca, or whatever his name is, he’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great! We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film, and it’s great to have you here, and you show it to your opponent”—presumably, he meant to say “candidate”—“because he’s never been there and probably will never come.” At this, there were cheers from the crowd, who understood that Allen was implicitly associating Webb with the urban liberals of the national Democratic Party. Recalling that Webb was in California, raising money, Allen turned again to Sidarth, and said, “His opponent”—again, meaning Webb—“actually, right now, is with a bunch of Hollywood movie moguls.” Alluding, perhaps, to Webb’s screenwriting ventures, Allen said, “We care about fact, not fiction. So, welcome, let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America, and the real world of Virginia.”

If Allen had any clue about what he’d just done, he didn’t show it. Smiling, he turned from Sidarth and resumed his stump speech: “My friends, we’re in the midst of a war on terror.”

The Webb campaign had no trouble recognizing the opportunity presented by Allen’s utterance. The incident occurred on a Friday. On Monday, Webb’s staff posted Sidarth’s video on YouTube, and mass-mailed the link to journalists and supporters. The next day, the Washington Post published a page-one story, the first of more than three dozen articles mentioning “Macaca” that the paper ran in the course of a month. The rest of the national press quickly followed, as did the television comedians, talk radio, and bloggers. “Macaca,” a word that few Americans surely had ever heard, became the signature of the political season.

Three weeks later, Webb pulled into Roanoke at the end of a long day on the road to address supporters at the opening of his local campaign headquarters. He told them that the campaign accommodations (provided without charge by Mud-cat Saunders, the landlord) were much nicer than the condemned building he was using in Arlington—a reminder that his campaign was continuing to struggle in the money race. But he also delivered some good news, which he’d learned that day. Earlier in the summer, he had trailed Allen by sixteen points; a new poll showed that the race had become a statistical dead heat.

I had accompanied Webb on the last leg of his journey to Roanoke, and as we made our way through the smoky rises and falls of the Blue Ridge he reflected on how his ancestors had crossed those mountains, after fleeing Ireland, only to take up new fights against new enemies—the Indians, the British, the Yankees, the Germans, the Vietcong. Webb’s ruddy pugnacity does not easily accommodate the joviality demanded by his new calling in politics. He can arrive at a campaign event looking as if he were ready to leave, and he hardly disguises his dislike of the glad-handing, the bargaining, and, especially, the begging for money. At a campaign rally in Alexandria last month, he was preceded at the lectern by Jim Moran, a congressman who is a Massachusetts transplant and the consummate Irish pol, and who said of Webb, “I have to tell you, he’s not all that comfortable in a political environment.” He added, “But it’s because he’s genuine, he’s real.”

Moran was followed by Barack Obama, who spoke without consulting notes and cited Newt Gingrich’s recommendation that the Democrats adopt the slogan “Had enough?” Obama continued, “Now, I don’t quote Newt all the time, but I’ve got to say, ol’ Newt is on to something right here. I don’t know about you, but I have had enough of a can’t do, won’t do, won’t even try style of government that we’ve been seeing in Washington.” As Obama elaborated on the Administration’s excesses and failures, the crowd took up the antiphonal chant and began cheering almost rapturously.

Then Webb stepped to the lectern. He praised Obama for the power of his words, and began reading, somewhat stiffly, his own speech—a carefully written address that included the observation “You know, back in another century, people like Marx and Engels talked about man being cut away from his land, his agricultural roots, and all the angst that followed from that. You know, today we risk being cut away from our government, from our democracy. The slash-and-burn politics of the Karl Rove era have too often obscured the real issues for America.”

Bill Connelly, Jr., a politics professor at Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia, observes, “He looks like somebody who’s making his first serious run for public office. He doesn’t ask for votes. He’s got to ask. There’s an intimacy in local politics that is expected. Part of George Allen’s appeal is that he’s this down-home country guy with cowboy boots, chewing tobacco, glad-handing—a down-to-earth guy. Retail politics matters, and Webb is not as good at it.”

But Webb did have one apparent edge—a warrior profile at a moment when the electorate was unnerved by Iraq and remained uncertain of the Democrats’ ability to take charge of national-security matters. The Webb campaign’s strategy had been to run a race reflecting his biography, his sense of command. “We want the whole thing being about leadership,” Pete Brodnitz, the campaign’s pollster, said. The “Gipper” ad introduced Virginians to the Jim Webb who is still so highly regarded by his former platoon members that his radioman, Mac McGarvey (who lost his right arm in Vietnam), moved in with him for the duration of the campaign, working as his driver.

With George Allen’s considerable advantage in amiability neutralized by the “Macaca” gaffe, there was a chance to move the focus of the contest to Webb. Instead, the campaign took an even weirder turn, which effectively pushed Webb off the stage. George Allen’s family history became the only story.

By mid-September, a month after Allen had welcomed “Macaca” Sidarth to “the real world of Virginia,” the word still held a powerful fascination, its etymology probed, its sound repeated, until it assumed an odd familiarity in political discourse. The controversy meshed neatly with another lingering problem for Allen—his alleged racial insensitivity, deriving from a youthful interest in the Old Confederacy. It was reported last spring that Allen wore a Confederate pin in a high-school photograph, and that he’d once kept a Rebel battle flag in his home office. Now his use of a term seen as a slur seemed to confirm the suspicions of those willing to believe that he was a racist.

“Macaca” was still very much in the air when, on September 18th, Allen and Webb arrived at a Fairfax County hotel for a debate. The large ballroom was packed with members of the Chamber of Commerce, reporters, and political partisans. One of the debate panelists, a local television reporter named Peggy Fox, was dubious about Allen’s claim that he hadn’t intended to insult Sidarth and had invented the word on the spot. “But the word is a racial slur in French-influenced African nations, most notably Tunisia,” Fox said. “Your mother’s Tunisian. Are you sure you never heard the word?” No, Allen replied, he hadn’t, and he apologized once again.

But Fox had opened another discomfiting line of inquiry—Allen’s heritage on his mother’s side. “It has been reported that her father, your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish,” Fox said. “Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews”—there was a collective gasp in the room—“and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?”

The matter of Allen’s ethnicity has lurked at the edges of his political career, largely because he has occasionally repeated a story that his mother, a French national who spent her childhood in North Africa, told him and his siblings: that her family had been hounded by the Nazis, and that her father, Felix Lumbroso, had been seized in the night and taken to prison. In August, the New York-based Jewish weekly The Forward published an article, by E. J. Kessler, revealing that the Lumbrosos were prominent Sephardic Jews in Tunisia; Felix Lumbroso, a wine importer, was also well known in the Sephardic community in France.

Allen had not discussed the matter with Kessler, and he physically recoiled at Fox’s question. The audience booed her for asking it. After lecturing Fox on the First Amendment, Allen demanded, “I would like to ask you, why is that relevant, my religion, Jim’s religion, or the religious beliefs of anyone out here?”

That got cheers, but Allen’s ethnicity became the next pressing issue of the campaign. The bloggers and the opinion writers questioned his apparent bemusement on the subject, and wondered whether he was trying to hide his Jewishness. “If it was discovered that Allen knew this family history, but attempted to keep it under wraps for whatever reason, it could do great harm to any political campaign,” John Mercurio, an analyst with the political tip sheet Hotline, said.

Overnight, Allen was transformed from a closet Confederate to a self-hating Jew. And things grew stranger still.

Having stumbled after “Macaca,” Allen now acted quickly. He issued a statement declaring, “I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line’s Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed.” He indicated that he had not owned up to his Jewishness at the debate earlier that week out of respect for his mother’s privacy. (He also told a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “I still had a ham sandwich for lunch.”) And then Allen made a remarkable appearance on CNN’s political show “Situation Room,” with the anchor, Wolf Blitzer, playing the role of Oprah. Allen told of visiting his mother in California in August and confronting her with the story of their family that had been laid out in The Forward.

“I was with my mother across the table,” he said. “And I asked her. I said, ‘You know, there’s these rumors flying around here that you’re Jewish or, you know, Jewish bloodlines and so forth.’ And I asked her, ‘Is this—is there anything to this?’ And I saw her reaction. And she said, ‘Yes, there are.’ And I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you ever tell?’ ‘I didn’t want to tell you. Do you love me? You won’t love me as much.’ I said, ‘Oh, Ma, why would that make—I love you even more. I respect you even more.’ When I heard of why she had hid this, for fear of retribution, of stigma, and how that would harm not just her but my father and her children—she was protecting her children. And I said, ‘Well, Ma, this just doesn’t matter. You know, the Nazis are gone. And it just doesn’t matter.’ ”

Allen has now claimed to embrace his Jewish identity. His discovery, he told Blitzer, had lent him new purpose. “I have been a leader for fighting against anti-Semitism and intolerance,” he said. “But now it’s personal. And I’m going to use my time here on Earth to continue to fight for freedom and justice, and to make sure intolerance never rears its ugly head in this country or anywhere else in the world.”

But Allen was immediately confronted by another surprise. On September 24th, the online magazine Salon published a story in which a former teammate of Allen’s on the University of Virginia football team alleged that the young Allen had been a rank racist who routinely used the term “nigger.” The teammate, a North Carolina radiologist named Ken Shelton, also told a bizarre story of a long-ago hunting trip with Allen. After the hunting party killed a doe, Shelton said, Allen severed the dead animal’s head and stuffed it in the mailbox of an African-American family.

The Times and the Washington Post quickly picked up the story, adding a new allegation. Christopher Taylor, now a professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, said he’d once visited Allen’s farm and was shocked by something Allen said. The two men had been discussing the problematically large population of turtles in Allen’s pond, Taylor claimed, when he asked Allen why he didn’t just kill the turtles and eat them. “We don’t eat them,” Allen was quoted as replying. “The niggers eat them.”

Allen again issued angry denials (“ludicrously false”), and his former wife, Anne Waddell, was among those who came forward to defend him. Yes, she said, Taylor had visited the farm, and there were turtles who fed on the Allens’ beloved goslings. She herself had fished the predatory turtles from the pond. “The person who ate the turtles,” she said, “was our neighbor.”

Allen now made appearances with African-American leaders; he spoke of his own awakening on racial matters on a pilgrimage to the civil-rights battlefields, such as Selma; he apologized so thoroughly for his misunderstanding of the pain caused by the symbols of the Confederacy that the Sons of Confederate Veterans demanded their own apology from him.

The common wisdom in the political commentariat was that George Allen was finished, at least as a national candidate. Conservative commentators were among the first to jump ship, including The Weekly Standard (“Forget the Presidential Campaign. Can he still win the Senate race?”), William F. Buckley, Jr., and the neoconservative writer John Podhoretz, who tagged Allen with a new name: Felix Macacawitz.

Throughout this curious drama, which unfolded in the crucial final weeks of the campaign, Jim Webb might as well have been on vacation. “We’d be just as happy to see it all go away,” Pete Brodnitz said. “We’re looking forward to beating Allen on the issues, and his lack of leadership.” When Webb was finally summoned back to the stage, it was not in the manner he might have wished. Inevitably, he was asked if he had ever uttered what the press, in one of its strained conventions of delicacy, called “the ‘n’ word.” He answered in a way that made it pretty clear that he had. “I don’t think that there’s anyone who grew up around the South that hasn’t had the word pass through their lips at one time in their life,” he told a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. That statement prompted demands for clarification, which came, in a fashion, from Webb’s spokeswoman, Kristian Denny Todd. Webb didn’t want to issue any blanket denial regarding the offensive word, as Allen had, she said. “Jim has not used the word directed at another person. He’s never used it himself as a racial slur.”

When October arrived, bringing with it the fresh scandal of the Florida congressman Mark Foley’s sexual exploitation of House pages, the frenzy in Virginia finally ended, with the race still being considered a toss-up. One possible outcome is that Allen, should he hold his Senate seat, will emerge as an even stronger national candidate, having weathered scrutiny of an intensity usually reserved for Presidential nominees.

As for Jim Webb, he seemed, by the ending days of the campaign, to be something less than the Happy Warrior. He had come into the race as a Democratic iconoclast, hoping to advance the debate on Iraq while broadening the Party, but he had found himself taken captive by George Allen’s controversies. He’d shown no taste for this sort of political knife fight, and one sensed that if this first campaign also proved to be his last he would survive the disappointment.

On the other hand, he has made some new friends. As an underdog challenger, running against an incumbent with deep pockets, Webb would inevitably have to come to terms with the Democratic Party’s two biggest stars. In late summer, he met privately with Hillary Clinton. “I went into the meeting not really expecting that I would necessarily like her, or that she would like me,” he recalled. “But I’ve got to tell you, I was impressed.” Last week, on the day George Allen brought President Bush to Virginia, James Webb and Bill Clinton held a fund-raiser of their own. When the two men met with reporters, Clinton said, “I’m encouraged for my country that we’re here together,” and he thanked his fellow-Democrat for the “sheer audacity” of his decision to make the race. ♦

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